Nice excerpt from Eric Schmidt’s interview at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando here on what the internet will look like in five years.

The key Excerpts for me are:

There will be more Chinese content than English

Assuming the phone manufacturers get it right, more people will be accessing by a mobile rather than PC

But for me the most important comment is:

Most people’s information will be gotten from other information as opposed to traditional information sources. People will listen to other people more than anyone else.

Those in PR that aren’t working to build advocates for their brands outside of the traditional media now, will be well behind the eight ball if Eric’s forecast becomes reality and I tend to think he won’t be wrong.

In my time working in PR I have been both an agency guy, as I am again now, and also a client, when I worked at Microsoft.

I learnt a hell of a lot during my time inhouse about managing agencies and made a hell of a lot of mistakes. To the wonderful teams I worked with at The Red Consultancy, Three Monkeys, Weber Shandwick UK and Inferno sorry for those mistakes. However I would like to think I learnt along the way and was better at it by the end than I was at the start.

Snarling never gets the job done. So imagine what happens when you decide not to send terse emails, leave rude voicemails or scold people at meetings? You get a better and stronger relationship.

Not even Houdini could read minds.

Your PR team can’t deliver the results you expect if you haven’t articulated them. Be direct. Tell them what your expectations are and then put it in writing. When everyone is on the same page there are no surprises.

Micromanaging = bad relationships.

Do you really need to read every single media pitch? Do you want to be cc’ed on every email among the team? When everyone can focus on their duties – the job generally gets done better.

Reading through the list though I think there are a few more that could be added.

The client can be wrong

As the client you will not always be right. You may insist on a strategy that doesn’t work out, perhaps even against the better judgement of your agency. If this does happen admit your mistake and work on how the situation can be rectified. A client is not infallible and should not pretend to be.

Clients do not have to be smarter than your agency

Don’t assume you always need to know all the answers. Even when you think you know the answer ask the advice of your team – their response may be a better solution or lead to a better collaborative outcome.

Don’t hold grudges

When mistakes are made on the agency side, address them, put in places measures to limit potential for reoccurrence and then move on.

Big up your agency internally and CC them

Ensure that the people internally recognise the good work your agency does. This will not take the limelight away from you, it will simply reinforce the great work you are responsible for and will ensure your team feels valued.

TweetEffect is a tool that I came across today, when trying to analyse what it is that is working from a client’s Twitter feed and what isn’t.

Being an egotist, I of course had to put my results in and was fascinated at what I saw. Generally there was small movements up and down, but there was a few posts that really seemed to shift my users numbers drastically.

The two posts that added most followers was a tweet that referenced social media, and the Black eyed Peas. Whilst Black eyed Peas are no doubt incredibly popular, I bet it was the social media words that made pricked people’s and perhaps more likely a few bots’ attention.

The other post that drove a lot of uplift was one I where I added to the #medievalbumperstickers meme that was going on last week. Though the dramatic drop off a few tweets later suggests this may be that Tiwtter was doing something funky?

What was the most damaging? Mentioning HotHouse’s new digital PR man @ScottRhodie…

In computing terms, I live a double life. At work, I use our corporate IT system which runs on Windows XP; at home, I’m a Mac user and have grown accustomed to the Apple environment. But for the last week, I’ve been living in a Windows world, preparing for the launch of Microsoft’s latest operating system.

I borrowed a small, very expensive Sony Vaio X running Windows 7 – the lightest laptop I’ve ever used – and tried to do as much of my work as possible using the unfamiliar operating system. I didn’t carry out the kind of tests you might find in a grown-up review but then most of us don’t do that – we just try to get on with new software and only really notice it when it goes wrong.

If you’re used to one operating system, trying another is like moving into a strange house – it may all look very nice, but it’s a pain trying to find out how to turn up the central heating or where the glasses are stored. But Windows 7 did at least boot up reasonably fast – Microsoft says it’s reduced the “footprint” of the system by 50%, and that’s made it more efficient.

The first thing I want to do when I switch on is connect to the internet. I’m used to searching out a wireless signal at the top of a Mac screen but I found, without too much trouble, a similar connection area to the right of the Windows taskbar and was quickly online.

The Start button in the bottom left-hand corner still provides the route to the applications, though the taskbar has become a little like Apple’s dock, so you can simply drag frequently-used applications onto it.

I set about opening a browser, e-mail and word processing applications, and tried to work out where I would keep my photos and music. That process somehow feels more integrated on a Mac because of the iLife suite that comes with it. But having dragged a few tracks and pictures off my home network into the Vaio, it was reasonably easy to start playing.

But what’s really different about using this operating system? The two things that stood out for me were the ability to hover over open items in the taskbar and see what was happening at a glance – and a function which allows you to snap two open windows alongside each other so that you can compare or maybe transfer information between them.

But here’s a funny thing. By the end of the week, I looked at what I was doing on the tiny screen – and found that just about everything involved software not made by Microsoft. So I’d installed the Firefox browser in preference to Internet Explorer, and started writing documents using Google Docs rather than Microsoft Word, and checking my e-mail via Gmail. As for music, I’d installed iTunes, and to feed my social networking needs, I placed Tweetdeck on the taskbar.

I had ended up furnishing my new Windows 7 home with some familiar items from elsewhere – so perhaps the operating system matters less than it once did.

Of course, what is really important to Microsoft is not winning over the minority who use Mac OS X or Linux variants, but reconnecting with the many previously loyal customers who were deeply unimpressed by Vista.

This week at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, I met Tony Sale, who has spent 15 years working to rebuild Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer used to crack German codes in World War II. At home, Tony has used every version of Windows since 3.1*, but he’s stopped at XP. What was wrong with Vista?

“It tried to tell me how to organise my files all the time, I didn’t like that.” By contrast, Tony says he finds XP very stable and very usable – and he’s going to have to be sure that Windows 7 does a similar, or better, job before upgrading.

Computing has come a long way since Colossus, but Microsoft’s customers will be asking the same question about its new operating system as the code-breakers did about their new-fangled toy. Does it do the same job better and faster than what we use now?

* As some commenters have pointed out, what Tony Sale must have started with was Windows 3.1, not 3.2 as I had previously written.

An Interesting post above from Guardian’s PDA blog on the public’s reaction to behavioural targetting online.

Most interesting section for me:

Some 66% do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests. Meanwhile, 69% think that there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything a website knows about them, a survey by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, revealed.

An interesting post here from the awfully clever Trevor Young. Whilst I don’t think this will arrest the long term circulation of Playboy it sure has garnered a lot of short term awareness.

Whilst I agree with Trevor’s sentiment generally I don’t necessarily think this is a risk for Playboy. This issue will undoubtedly be a hit on the newsagent racks and will appeal well beyond its fan base. Not that I think PR people shouldn’t be taking risks mind.